Evenbalance the site for Punkbuster have today released their retort to netCoders recent attacks on their anticheat software;

Quote

We rarely announce anything regarding commercial cheats and hacks. However, we are aware of the numerous "You Tube" type videos and posts on various sites where hackers who sell cheats make claims that are false but sound believable about PunkBuster and hack detection status. We receive numerous emails daily by concerned honest players regarding advertisements for undetectable hacks, etc. The truth is that via recent enhancements to PunkBuster's detection capabilities, we have cracked down hard on cheaters who pay for hacks in the games we support. Some commercial cheat sites have closed down due to our new methods and others have private forums where punks routinely complain about getting caught with the "undetectable" hacks, demanding refunds, etc. We have always maintained a strict policy of not giving money to punks, but thanks to community volunteer moles who have helped us obtain access to private hacks via donations of their time, etc., PunkBuster has been catching hacks from virtually all commercial cheat sites in recent weeks and months.

One of the recent enhancements involves our memory scanner which aggressively scans for patterns included in known cheats (public and private). A commercial hack site where we have had recent success catching their subscribers has recently staged a few demonstrations of inserting text-based patterns via certain chat-related systems such as IRC, Instant Messaging, etc. directly into the memory of computers. These are specific text patterns that we have deployed in some supported games in the recent past. It is clear that many of the demonstrators are cheat-supporters willingly participating in the demonstration, but there is evidence that some innocent players had PunkBuster violations triggered during the past few days by the hackers who sent specific text patterns into the chat programs that were open during gameplay. We are removing these text based patterns from our system and encourage admins to not ban for PB violations that occurred during the past few days.

Online gamers who play with other programs running should always enable security features in their messaging and chat programs to deny auto-download of files and only accept downloads from people they know and trust. As always, from PunkBuster's standpoint, if a known cheat pattern is in the memory of the computer during gameplay, then a violation will be triggered. We have always suggested closing other programs while you are playing multiplayer games on PunkBuster servers and that remains the safest policy. Leagues that require chat room usage for competitive play should take steps to ensure that only league participants have access and suspicious activity should be reported to us when there are concerns about manipulating the system.

However on the same day, netCoders have announced their exploit now works in Call of Duty 4 and Battlefield.

Just four days ago Team SPEED-LINK announced the disbandment of their famous Call of Duty team. The team around captain Michael Trigger Sowa decided to call it a day after most of them have been together since OCRANA in Call of Duty 1. After CDC 4 in Enschede Daniel humm3L Müller informed his teammates that he has to cut down because of his health issues. At that point the team seemed to have lost their motivation, so they called an end to their time in CoD4.

Only some days later the german organisation announced their comeback in the scene. To be more precise they picked up the famous german team KomaCrew, which consists of the following players:

Thorsten Silber Mohr (Team-Manager)
Robert smithz' Krivka (Team-Captain)
Marco juL Barasi (Co-Captain)
Marcel asset' Schonlau
Eugen gene' Beilemann
Ralf n1Tro Beyer
Tim sM!Tty Ebert
Sascha butzemann Urlau (Backup)

These guys are currently participating in the ClanBase EuroCup, ESL Major Series, CoDQCup and the ESL Amateur Series where they are placed 1st with 11 wins and not a single loss at the moment.

Team SPEED-LINK // #Team-SPEEDLINK

Yes the rumours are true, RTCW IS BACK! We will be hosting two cups in the coming weeks the cups will be played on RTCW 1.4 (1.41) and OSP 0.9. Files are available at the website to help get you started.

***YOU WILL NEED A VALID CD-KEY***
Firstly a 3on3 1-day-cup on Sunday 6th April, starting at 15:00 CET. The cup will be played as two maps per round with each team picking a map, and then elimating for a decider. The maplist is mp_beach, mp_base, mp_ice and te_frostbite (subject to change)
Then starting on Sunday 13th April the 6on6 cup begins, stretching over the space of a week or two depending on signups, hopefully with WTV finals. The cup will be played as double elimination with two maps per round with ABBA stopwatch rounds for each.
One map will be picked by each team, from a mappool of mp_beach, mp_base, mp_ice, mp_village, mp_assault and te_frostbite. (subject to change)
If 6on6 signups are low we may have to revert to a 6on6 1-day-cup with double elimation.

Admins: crumbs, juncie, merlinator, abort

To signup simply msg RTCW-crumbs @ quakenet or send crumbs a crossfire pm with your team name, tag and player names. I would rather you just sent me pms to update you rosters instead of having tba players. If anyone is interested in being an admin/referee could you also msg me.
Finally RTCW is currently a bit short of servers, if any one is willing to host a server for the cup, that would be greatly appreciated.

irc: #RTCW-cup / #revive.rtcw / #rtcw.wars
url: http://www.rtcw-cup.com

Another Qualification Day


Midweek, weekend is approaching again and the last qualification games are on the road to finally start this seasons eurocup. We have traveled to serveral countrys this week to see some spectacular matches. France, Netherlands, Poland etc. and today we are gonna mix them all up as 2 euro-mixed teams are gonna face eachother , and what kind of teams..

Result - Fatgames 4-0 o6

FatGames
line up
etsi
kot
S4rna
urtier
sol
Holz
Oceans6
line up
Nonix
Senti
Matzi
Hype
tornis
Fatal

Gamestv info
http://www.gamestv.org/event/4481-fatgames-vs-oceans6/

This week is Qualifying Round 2, twenty four teams from across Europe and the world will play each other, half of them will be eliminated, half of them will make it through to the groupstage of the ESL Major Series.

Prizes
Remember, the prize distribution for this season's top 3 teams is a grand total of €1.500 cash!



Qualifying Round 2
Teams that won in Qualifying Round 1 have been randomly placed against teams that qualified for Qualifying Round 2, the winners will go through to the ESL Major Series Groupstage.

Matches are played one map, first to 13 rounds, map is chosen by veto, matches should be played by midnight Sunday.

Veto system: Teams eliminate maps from the map pool in order based on their position on the match page - Left, right, right, left, right.

Pool: mp_backlot, mp_citystreets, mp_crash, mp_crossfire, mp_strike, mp_vacant

Teams with any questions or problems should make a support ticket or write a match protest.

After a mind blowing CoD4 tournament at i33 I return to the comfy confines of my bedroom and back to reality. Live2Win is moving into its closing stages and as such deserves my full attention!

20:00 GMT - Losers Bracket Round 3 - Dtekt e-Sports vs Audacity on Strike

Dtekt have had a tricky run through the knockout phase being dropped into the losers bracket early on by Ultima Ratio. Since then they have fought their way through into this lower bracket round 3 beating Team Coolermaster UK on the way who this weekend held the i33 champions Dignitas to a 12-12 draw although admitedly PlaZma was stuck in Norway at the time.

Audacity were knocked to the lower bracket in round 2 by Roskilde Ravens 13-8 and then had a tight game on Vacant against Teamxeq 13-11.

Join Deman with Live Video Coverage from 20:00 GMT on QuadV TV1

Just hours after a thrilling Call of Duty 4 final finishes the i34 or M-Festival prize purse is announced!

PRIZE FUND GUARANTEED (NOT linked to number of teams entered)
1st - €6,000
2nd - €3,000
3rd - €1,500
4th - €500
5th - €250
6th - €250
7th - €250
8th - €250
Total - €12,000

After such an amazing tournament at Multiplays i33 with Dignitas taking victory over TheLastRest in epic style Wizzo has immediatly responded by matching the prize fund for i34.

i34 will be on August 8th - 11th in a new venue at Stoneleigh Park with 2000 places for BYOC and a seperate TUP area. You can see more details over at the Multiplay Event website.

Another Qualification Day


Today once again Eurocup is gonna respresent itself to be a great competition as two of polish success stories are going into battle. It is a shame that one of both teams will have to bowl away out of eurocup after tonight as both of them certainly had the players to make a stand in the upcoming season. Now let's have a quick look at the teams.

Fear Factory X-Fi
line up
Wrobel
uf0l
wiesiek
wiadro
n00n
FragStealer
Authentic Gaming
line up
dialer
Krein
naga.
fobje
zMk
^uniX

Gamestv info
http://www.gamestv.org/event/4479-fear-factory-x-fi-vs-authentic-gaming/

UPDATE This now effects Call of Duty - If you are a Call of Duty player who did not read this, make sure you do!

As many of you have seen nC have today unleashed their latest weapon and this is how it works.

The source of their new found ability comes from "pnkbsra / b .exe" - basically they've isolated that what this does is scan the entire virtual memory for vm signatures and they find certain vm signatures that PB will kick for. That pnkbsra scans the entire virtual memory, so if you've MSN or iRC open at the time, and you get sent this message when you're connected to PB then it will show up in your VM and you will get kicked.

The method they used to get to this conclusion was reverse engineering - their justification for claiming that is legal is because 3 different virus scanners pick PB up as a trojan and thus is a threat and its legal to reverse engineer a threat (apparently).

As announced some weeks ago, the German PC magazine GameStar added Crossfire game ET: Quake Wars to their list of competitions for GameStar Liga Season 12 which features a prize money of €30,000 for six games. ET: Quake Wars gets a so called "Supported League" with a prize money of 1175 € and will see a total of 16 ET:QW teams joining the group stage.

Some days ago, GameStar set their new homepage online and presented also the teams and biggest rule changes for the 12th Season which will start by Tuesday evening.